An Examination of Anthropogenic Climate Change

 Beginning in the early 1970s I began to hear claims of anthropogenic climate change.   In those days the claim was not just of generic climate change but claims of climate warming.  I was even then astonished by the uncritical affirmation of this theory and was from the outset highly skeptical of this viewpoint for some very specific reasons.

The climate of the earth is controlled by gigantic natural forces far beyond the influence of any man, group of men. or indeed of all men.    Rather than just asserting these vast natural forces it is important to lay them out for examination as well.    

The earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago in the huge disc of debris that orbited around the very young sun.   It was formed by collisions of asteroids and comets that lasted millions of years. At the earliest period the earth had no oxygen in the atmosphere at all and the surface was entirely molten lava. Surface temperatures probably exceeded 5kF.  With radioactive decay the temperature of the surface gradually cooled.   In the late accretion phase asteroids brought in water in sufficient quantities to form the oceans we see today.

The first contributor to climate on earth is the sun and extraterrestrial impact events.   If solar output increases only slightly the earth will broil.  If solar output decreases only slightly the earth will freeze. This can at least partially be observed as climate tends to vary with the solar cycle of approximately eleven years.   Impact events have caused vast changes in climate and major extinctions.  Today it is believed that even the moon is a result of an early impact event,  and its formation and orbit over billions of years has tended to regulate climate on earth by stabilizing the tilt of the earth on its axis and lengthening the period of precession to about 24k years.   This influences climate on earth greatly because land masses and oceans are not evenly distributed on the planet.  There is more land mass in the northern hemisphere and more ocean in the southern hemisphere. 

Another extraterrestrial factor also regulates climate on earth.   Over lengthy periods of time of about 400k years the shape of earth's orbit changes.  Sometimes it is more circular and sometimes it is more elliptical.  This is thought to be caused by the gravitational influence of Venus and Jupiter.  A more circular orbit provides for milder climates while an elliptical orbit produces hotter summers and colder winters.

In short time frames the biomass of the planet sequesters carbon and in long time frames the earth itself sequesters carbon.  Decaying organic material is washed off the land masses and is deposited in the oceans. The thick layer of decaying organic material covering the ocean floor of basalt is drawn under continental plates of granite and recooked by the earth to emerge in volcanic eruptions with releases of prodigious quantities of carbon dioxide and other toxic gases. Additionally, in peat deposits and from ocean floors the earth frequently releases large quantities of methane.  In other areas biomass from the surface is trapped deep in the earth and over lengthy periods of time becomes deposits of coal, natural gas, and petroleum.

It cannot be emphasized enough that without a very hot solid core surrounded by liquid iron the earth would not have a magnetic field. Without a magnetic field the solar wind would blow the atmosphere off the planet, the oceans would evaporate, and the water vapor would escape into space.   So the biomass of the planet and plate tectonics  regulate the carbon cycle on earth.  With all of these natural factors in play the carbon dioxide and oxygen content of the atmosphere has varied widely over billions of years without any input from man at all.  Oceans have been both significantly lower and higher than they are today. Temperatures have varied greatly.  At times the earth has been almost entirely sub-tropical or tropical while at other times the earth has been covered with glaciers all the way to the equator.  The notion that man in his grandeur and power can cause the oceans to recede is absurd.

The activities of man are two fold.  On the one hand man liberates large amounts of carbon in the form of coal, natural gas, and petroleum.  On the other hand man sequesters carbon in many of his activities.  Man sequesters carbon over long periods of time in building materials, asphalt, rubber, plastics, utility poles,  and thousands of other products.

While it is easy to measure the amount of carbon that man liberates, it is very difficult to measure the amount of carbon that man sequesters.  Moreover it is difficult to measure both the amount of carbon which the earth liberates and the amount of carbon which the earth sequesters.  The efforts aimed at measuring this have proved unproductive.  As it happens, if one measures carbon liberated and subtracts carbon sequestered (both by man and by nature) there is a problem. The difference should appear as an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but this does not happen.   What happens is that as much as 25% of the liberated carbon has somehow disappeared.  It has not really disappeared, rather it has been sequestered somehow that we have been unable to determine. 

 Today the earth is in a terminal phase of de-glaciation.   It has been warming for the most part since the end of the little ice age.  The next major phase of climate change will probably be global cooling leading into a new period of glaciation.  This change may take tens of thousands of years or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of years.

 The end result of this kind of examination will reach an inescapable conclusion that the natural forces controlling the carbon cycle render any contribution by man as statistically insignificant.  Man is much less important in the grand scheme of things than many are willing to admit.  As much as he may try, man will never usher in an utopia.

   

 

 

 

The Triumph of Tutelary Fascism

The results of the presidential election of 2020 are now in and becoming fully exposed.   What transpired was a national fraud on what can only be described as an industrial scale.  As such the victory of the usurper Joe Biden signals the end of the democratic representative constitutional republic and the birth of a new form of government: a tutelary fascist patriarchy of judicial supremacy.   This result constitutes the end of the rule of law.   The Scotus decision not to hear the Texas case against swing states was a repudiation of Article II of the constitution, the rule of law, due process, the equal protection clause, the first amendment, and the description of the Amendment process in the constitution.   It was as if the Constitution was a pattern target hit by a shotgun blast.  The Supreme Court ruled effectively against the first amendment right to petition government for a redress of grievances.   Further it established that state executives, Governors, election commissions, may amend the federal Constitution from their offices and that state courts may amend the federal Constitution from the bench.

As an informed American on these issues, as soon as Biden is inaugurated I will go to my local Supervisor of Elections Office and remove myself from the list of registered voters.   I will not again lend the credibility of my participation to another national fraud.  It will never happen again.  I expect millions of Americans to do the same thing, so many so that within the first two years of the Biden administration the idea of passing a law to require persons to vote in federal elections will be floated and most likely passed. Fortunately I have no children or grandchildren, so I have no descendants whom they will be able to hang from meat hooks and beat with rubber hoses.

The Goose Stepper Jig

 As it looks most probable now that Biden will be declared the winner of the 2020 election by a corrupt court system it remains to be seen how rapidly he will implement his promises.  The promises are far reaching and in some cases incomprehensible.   He promised to take down the wall built by Trump, forgive student loan debt, end the fossil fuel industries and by extension all petrochemical production, force the end of manufacturing of internal combustion engines, end air flight and aircraft manufacturing, institute medicare for all persons in the world health care system, throw open the borders, end all zoning in local jurisdictions, implement a national shut down, force the wearing of face masks, end agribusiness by compelling a return to subsistence farming, force the closure of all charter schools, seize all of the firearms owned by Americans,  and take care to keep a list of all those who dared to oppose his bizarre ideology so they may be suitably punished. The whole approach is intellectually vacuous. 

Fascism always ends the same way....by persons hanging from meat hooks and receiving beatings with rubber hoses.  The left has long believed many of the same things.  The left are Hegelians.  They believe that man redeems himself in the historical process through conflict, violence, and punishment.  They view the average man in the street as an incompetent fool who must be housed, led, fed, and most of all punished. For the left the fundamental existential truth of the universe is the punishment of man into submission.   Biden and his entire family are grifters who have suckled at the federal sow for half a century. Of every thing that he knows and believes is the core belief...that he is your better.  

The major problem with this agenda is that persons cannot be persuaded to change their deeply held views.   The most that can be accomplished is that their silence can be and will be compelled.

Biden Will Resume the March to No-Win Wars

Biden admitted in a now famous video that the Democrat Party created a huge election fraud scheme.  Nothing will be done about this just as nothing was done about the Obama administration spying on Trump during his campaign and deep into his presidency.    How can this be?   It is simple.  Follow the money.  Biden will resume the offshoring of manufacturing and jobs because this is how his family became wealthy.   It has been refined but still essentially the same influence peddling scheme for which Clinton became famous.

However, the most dangerous aspect of a Biden presidency will be the return to a march to war with Iran or North Korea or others.   He may well even reverse the peace deals reached by  Trump in the Middle East.   After all war is the health of the state and nothing could possibly be worse for business than that peace break out across the planet.

We can also expect the end of the effort to eliminate the China grip on many assorted supply chains.  Further it is entirely likely that the CDC or NIH under Biden will fund once again the Wuhan Lab that engineered the Virus afflicting the world.   Since such a scheme worked well once it is likely to be repeated.

These and many similar forecasts do not require any prescience to predict.  The huge inroads made by Trump into the Democrat base with minorities mean that from a demographic standpoint the Democrats cannot win any more presidential elections without widespread fraud.

In the lead up to the election in 2020 many state courts changed election laws by fiat and eliminated the need for signature verification and extending the periods for late counting and even eliminated requirements that voting take place before the closing of polls on election day.  This may well be before the Supreme Court as a violation of the Constitutional provision that the state legislatures determine the manner of the selection of electors.  The most likely outcome of such a case is that the Supreme Court will rule that in effect state courts possess the power to amend the Constitution from the bench.

It will be the kind of decision for which no one can predict its certain dire consequences.

Wear a Face Mask

 The need for wearing face masks and practicing social distancing is becoming increasingly clear.   There is no way to predict what new bio-weapon China will release upon the world to kill hundreds of thousands of people and inflict trillions of dollars of damage.  The Chinese have become skillful in the past, insisting on others to practice free trade while they practiced mercantilism.  However, they never learned a fundamental principle of capitalism that it is unwise to murder your customers.   It remains yet to be determined the breadth and depth of backlash which may take some time to fully emerge. 

Congress: Investigate Kung Flu

 A Congressional investigation is needed of the Kung Flu virus as soon as it fades into the blood stained pages of history.  The investigation needs to probe the two most important issues and provide clear answers to two questions:

1.   Why did the U.S. government fund the virology lab in Wuhan?

2.   Was the virus which is a part of the natural order discovered in the Wuhan lab or was the virus which is not a part of the natural order created in the Wuhan lab?

All intelligent persons know that the answers to these two questions will never be earnestly sought.

THE WAY FORWARD?

  Everyone educated before 1960 or so knows how the United States was formed and the design of government which the founders followed.   They were intent on founding a democratic representative constitutional republic.

   There were flaws in the founding to be sure.  They had an unwarranted commitment to unity.  So much so was this the case that they sacrificed the natural rights of man (slaves) to their vision of unity.   Anyone who knows anything at all about values knows that unity and diversity are both subordinate and not absolute values. The second problem in the founding was expressed in the early and extensive speech by Luther Martin.  He argued persuasively that the lower body of the legislature in its proportional representation constituted a surrender of sovereignty by the states.  He was right.  Had I been there I would on these points have walked out of the convention with him and not returned.  Madison's deprecating remarks about Luther Martin were probably one of the earliest examples of the resort to ad hominem in American political history when substantive counter points were outside his intellectual reach.

  Nevertheless, the Constitution was ratified by the states and it has been downhill ever since.  One of the early egregious moves occurred in Marbury v. Madison to which we may attribute the beginning of judicial supremacy.   For those looking for a modern example of judicial supremacy they may find it in any edition of any major paper running an article on Iran.  Iran is an example of judicial supremacy.  In judicial supremacy law really does not matter at all.  It is belief that is of the greatest importance.  In recent times the power of belief has been reflected in one quite astonishing ruling of the Supreme Court.   The ruling that carbon dioxide is a pollutant in our atmosphere represents the triumph of ignorance in our society and exposes the environmental movement as nothing more than an apocalyptic religious cult.

  Later in the history of the country came the rise of the administrative state and a host of bad Supreme Court decisions especially arising from the expansive use of the commerce clause.

 The belief system that accompanied the formation of the administrative state was an acceptance of the Hegelian historical dialectic produced by Fichte and put into practice by Hegel.   There was also their radical repudiation of the value of the individual continued by Feuerbach.   The anthropology in the ideas of the German idealists was that man was a perfectible being who perfected himself in the historical process through conflict, violence, and punishment. The German idealists were rationalists like Joe Biden who ‘chose truth over facts'.  So to them it was no matter of concern that man had not perfected himself in the past five thousand years of recorded history and therefore unlikely that he would perfect himself in either the near or remote future.  They believed that the fundamental existential truth of the universe was the punishment of man into submission.   It was a sort of science fiction Borgian view:  'you must submit, you must comply, and resistance is futile'.

  Other aspects of the 'slouch toward Gomorrah' made the situation even worse.   The net result of all this is that our current form of government is a tutelary fascist patriarchy of judicial supremacy.  Some might ask, 'fascism'?  Vast segments of the modern economy are owned or controlled by the State.   For instance, healthcare, retirement plans, transportation, land use, education, and energy production are all highly regulated by government.  Some might ask, 'patriarchy'?   It is a common view among many politicians of the left to view their constituents as children who need to be led, fed, housed, clothed, and most of all punished.  They tend to see all levels of government from local to federal as acting in loco parentis. One must remember that Barak Obama announced to an audience as he campaigned for reelection in 2012, 'we are going to punish our enemies and reward our friends'.

 In stark contrast to the German idealists and their modern day acolytes the founders did not uncritically accept the notion of the perfectibility of man.   They saw man as deeply flawed and frequently exploiting the weaknesses of others in naked self-aggrandizement.  The solution to this flawed character was the separation of powers.   The most egregious behaviors of man in society were to be controlled by the 'chains of the constitution'.  Unlike the German idealists the founders were not rationalists but rather were empiricists.  They were followers of John Locke and undoubtedly had a thorough understanding of his great empirical work in which he asserted, 'there is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses'.    Even in the later Federalist papers Hamilton asserted that the 'least fallible' source of all human knowledge and understanding is personal experience.     As I heard my late father (who was an industrial mechanical engineer) say on many occasions, 'a single test is worth a thousand expert opinions'.
  
 The question then comes, what is our exit strategy and what is the way forward for us to a rebirth of liberty?   I do not know the answer to this question.   Several ideas come to mind.  An elimination of sovereign immunity would help. Reform of libel laws would help.  Deconstructing the administrative state would be imperative. There would of necessity be a new recognition that the administrative state itself is a violation of the constitution which vests all legislative power in the House of Representatives and the Senate.    A balanced budget and a line item veto would help, and so forth.
Proposals to move forward with an Article 5 convention have been made.  The problem with all of these approaches is that since the political class does not obey the current constitution significant doubt remains whether they would obey either a new constitution or new amendments.

 The founders accepted the idea of natural law.   This was the idea that without regard to any Holy Scripture, the universe as it exists bears moral content.   Jefferson says as much when he refers to self-evident truth.  The first principle of natural law, the 'unmoved mover' of natural law to which all other asserted aspects of natural law must be subordinate is the inestimable value of every individual. The claim 'all men are created equal' is nothing more than the assertion that none of us is endowed with a right to dominion and none are endowed with an obligation of servitude.

 The founders rejected the idea that the fundamental existential truth of the universe is the punishment of man into submission.  They asserted natural law demonstrating that all forms of government must arise from the religious disposition of man.  However any person defined God they believed that the fundamental existential truth of the universe was the grace of God triumphant in the affairs of men. Grace and moral suasion were to replace punishment and compulsion. This was the greatness of the American idea and it was exceptional.

 Modern man does not believe in natural law.  The center of gravity today in American Society is existentialism.   In this view each of us creates our own values as we wrestle with the exigencies and vicissitudes of our lives.  All of these constructed value systems are morally equivalent.   This has produced an atmosphere of moral relativism and multiculturalism.  Further, as one walks away from natural law, one loses any basis for universal human rights and returns to the barbarism of tribalism.

Another aspect of humanity militating against a rebirth of liberty is psychological.  Even a cursory examination of tyranny in history reveals a widespread insatiable desire in despots for the accumulation and expansion of power.   The drive for domination over others who must submit is quite striking.  It is almost certain that this unquenchable desire to exercise dominion over others, to direct their lives, and to manipulate their persons is related to domination and submission in sadomasochism.  It can reasonably be argued that modern statism is advocated by persons who have a socio-sexual personality disorder.  Most likely this disorder can only be treated through extensive group therapy.  It is, however, to be noted that sexual disorders are the most difficult to successfully treat and seldom result in the recovery of the individual.

 There must be a recovery of the moral center of man in our society.  I do not know how to address this complex problem.  But this I do know:  the answer will not be found in any text written by Immanuel Kant.